ESA/Hubble Picture of the Month · December 29, 2025
A neighbouring vista of stellar birth
Where it is in your sky
- Object
- LMC N159
- In the same part of the sky as Large Magellanic Cloud
- Constellation
- Dorado
- Distance
- 160000 light years
- Field of view
- 2.4′ (the full Moon is 31′)
- Best seen
- Evenings from October to February; highest at midnight in December
- Climbs above 20°
- From the South Pole to the equator
- Never rises
- North of 20° N
- What you need
- Beyond backyard telescopes — this is a Webb/Hubble-class target
- Large Magellanic Cloud itself: naked eye, from a dark site
Tonight from your location
From the source
Today’s ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week highlights another view of a distant stellar birthplace. Captured in a parallel field to a recently released image, this scene reveals a neighbouring region of the N159 star-forming complex in the Large Magellanic Cloud, approximately 160 000 light-years away.
Thick clouds of cold hydrogen gas dominate the scene, forming a complex network of ridges, cavities, and glowing filaments. Embedded within these dense clouds, newly formed stars begin to shine, their intense radiation causing the surrounding hydrogen to glow in deep red tones.
The brightest regions mark the presence of hot, massive young stars whose powerful stellar winds and energetic light reshape their environment. These forces carve out bubble-like structures and hollowed cavities in the gas, clear signatures of stellar feedback in action. Dark clouds in the foreground are lit from behind by new stars. Together, the glowing clouds and sculpted bubbles reveal a dynamic interplay between star formation and the material from which stars are born, capturing the ongoing cycle of creation and transformation within this neighbouring galactic system.
N159 is one of the most massive star-forming clouds in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is the largest of the small galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. This image shows just a portion of this expansive star-forming complex, as the entire complex stretches over 150 light-years across.
From ESA/Hubble Picture of the Month. ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Indebetouw, CC BY 4.0; links removed.
